Spiderfield

Cutting stripwood Well that is… well… boring. After sticking al the stripwood on to the cardboard body I use a  little sandingtool to smooth the edges. The next step is staining the blank stripwood with a mix of rubbing aclohol and Indian ink. Once the building is done, I applied a wash of red paint[…]

Here are the first steps of building a scratchbuild grain elevator. First I tried to find a drawing of a grain elevator. That wasn’t easy to say the least. After several attempts I decided to take the measurements of my grain elevator from a picture. (left) In the previous post the are two pictures of[…]

A new project is boiling in my mind; scratch build a grain elevator. First a bit of history of Grain Elevators The need for Grain elevators emerged in the mid 1800’s in North America when agriculture moved to a cash crop economy following the invention of the Cyrus McCormick Mechanical Reaper. The McCormick reaper machine[…]

The Golden Spike Tower in North Platte, Nebraska, rises 8 stories above Union Pacific’s 2,850-acre Bailey Yard the world’s largest train yard. Take a look at the webcam stream. Truly a once in a lifetime experience: The Golden Spike Tower and Visitor Center-more trains than you can keep track of! Website: www.goldenspiketower.com

At last the GP18 has made it’s way to te layout. Fitted with an wrong sound decoder, it should be a non-turbo version of the EMD 567 prime mover, the GP18 has made it’s first inches on my layout after more then ten years of collecting dust. (added an extra clip of my GP7)

Part 1 – overview The next project will be the restoration and rebuild of a more than ten years old model of a Proto 2000 Southern GP18 of the first run. These locomotives predated DCC. There was no circuit board in them, just a diode bundle for the directional lighting. Goal of the project will[…]

In the august 2013 number of Modelrailroad Magazine there was a description of scratchbuilding a branchline watertank from stripwood. It seemed to be a perfect fit for my scenic’d timesaver layout. Here is a short description of building the watertank. Parts For scratchbuilding the watertank I used the following materials. A pack of wooden stirring[…]

When I start building the Timesaver I wished (at least) for two locomotives. A GP7 and an USRA 0-8-0. The Geep was the first loco I bought for my little switching layout. With the purchase of the USRA 0-8-0 my rolling stock is complete. (for now) The Walthers Heritage 0-8-0 is from the latest limited run.

In the previous post I described the sound upgrade of the Virginian 737. Now I will tune the decoder so the loco will run as smooth as possible. Remember, this is just a guide, you can (and should) always adjust the settings the way you like the most. It’s just an example of how it[…]

It’s been a long time since there was an update on this blog, but at last, here it is. My first American steam loco! Although not ecxactly suited for the timesaver layout, still a great machine to look at. And now also a great machine to listen at. The model is dcc-ready. It is suited[…]